- Play opens with Liza walking in on Aspechka making omelettes with Basilisk in the kitchen; they talk a bit about what's been happening, how Liza's been doing, and how Aspechka and Basilisk are pretty relieved that the various alternate Lizas are out of the picture. Liza realizes she has a lot more free time now, and considers getting a hobby. Aspechka asks her what she wants to do now with her time, anyways.
- Cora and Ovida address the collective student body, faculty, and staff of the Bleak Academy, putting an immediate pause on all classes, dissolving all the colleges, and putting all programs under review as they pivot to a new ideology and the development of a class of Eidolons. A portion of the crowd departs, but a sizable portion remains. Ovida walks among them, and is met with a mix of surprise, disgust, curiosity, and other emotions as people see that the Academy's architecture is now also a cute girl for some reason. Cora departs and takes up residence in the old Headmaster's office, before Ovida joins her. They talk and have a disagreement about He, Death, but end up embracing and kissing as the flowers speared through Cora's chest bloom, as well as throughout the Academy.
- Liza returns to the labyrinth and finds the sky eating away at the ceiling; the plants overgrowing and breaking down the concrete; the heart turned into a basin full of water and a great hawthorn tree that reaches to the sky; and insects and birds and hybrids in between all about as the realm transforms into something else. She returns and invites her family to visit; after a bit of hesitation from Aspechka, the three of them all visit the realm.
- Ovida visits Jasper Irinka to update her a bit on what's going on, and also to invite her to come visit He, Death with her. After creating additional opportunities to insert her foot in her mouth, she is asked to leave by Jasper.
- Cora calls a meeting of the remaining faculty and is assaulted by questions and at least one offer to be dissected by a metaphysician. Topics range from her credentials, personal experience, the nature of the new curricula, omens concerning the Academy manifesting a cute girl, whether willing victims exist, the granting of full amnesty to the faculty, Cora's titles, and the sourcing of a professor's entrails for auguries. Somehow, Cora survives.
- Ovida goes on a search for He, Death and finds a great arc, a procession of shapes and forms and pennants and flowers and black and white and words and mausoleum palanquins into the distance, cutting a rift into the Outside with its passage. She speaks, and the inchoate will of the former Headmaster responds in memories and senses and stories of the past. He is expelled. He is cast out. He is becoming as something new. They are marching to the shore, out from death, as they build a new flesh from law and something new and terrible and glorious will be reborn into the created world.
He misses her, his daughter, and shall not meet her again like this.
Ovida tears open her empty chest, and bleeds her blood of water and blood and stars into the procession. A terminus is approached. A beginning and an end. - Cora, stumbling into Liza's house, desperately asks if Liza wants a job.
- they/them, but watch out
- twitter.com/geostatonary
professional crafter of artisanal queer tatterpigs | I'm the monster wreathed in smoke and orange blossoms
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